AuthorTopic: SOHO VL-6 Final bug reports (Read 19026 times)

I had said I was going to wait for the SOHO Deluxe version before I installed, but when I read some reports of problems during the installation, I decided to put a temporary copy of the free release on a spare partition just to see whether I would encounter a bug I could report. I had had a problem of being unable to install with one of the betas or RCs, which was fixed in later releases.

Well, the installation went splendidly with no problems whatever. I was very happy about that! As part of my experiment, I decided to omit the KDE choice while installing to see if I could install XFce with slapt-get and avoid KDE altogether. So I installed XFce and tried to start it, first with startx and then with startxfce4. A couple of times I did see an XFce desktop, but both keyboard and mouse were completely unresponsive and I had to turn off the computer in order to get out of the mess. Several steps earlier I had gotten a message about needing KDM, GDM, WDM or XDM in order to start the GUI. I installed GDM with slapt-get. But I start in text mode by choice. Things got worse. Now typing startx or startxfce4 gives me a black screen with no response from keyboard or mouse, requiring me to turn off the computer.

I have run VASM to identify my hardware. I am using the xorg radeon driver just as I've done in RC3 and the earlier releases. I even copied the xorg.conf file from my RC3 partition to the SOHO Final partition. Same results: lockup as soon as I try to start X. I do see a very brief flash of a graphical desktop but immediately after that the screen goes black with dead keyboard and mouse.

Is there something I'm missing because I didn't install any of KDE? If so, can I add it now? The two avahi things near the end of dmesg fail because I don't think I have avahi-anything installed. It didn't look like something I needed, though, when I checked with gslapt on my RC3 installation. I looked in the /var/log xorg files through my RC3 partition. The last two lines of /var/log/Xorg.0 log are(II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Keyboard0" (type: KEYBOARD)(EE) config/hal: couldn't initialise context: unknown error (null)

I don't know if that means anything.

I'd be *so happy* if I could install SOHO Deluxe without KDE and get a working XFce. Any help would be most appreciated!--GrannyGeek

Just for completeness, I thought I'd document how I got a smoothly running KDE 4. Previously I added an xorg.conf file as shown below. This allowed me to actually login to KDE. In light of my subsequent work, I'm not sure the xorg.conf file is necessary, but I haven't tried logging in without it.

Quote

Section "ServerFlags"Option "AIGLX" "off"EndSection

Section "Extensions"Option "Composite" "Disable"EndSection

After searching around, I found some ways to make KDE work way faster here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=81677. The first was to start up kdebugdialog and chose "Deselect all". This gave a serious speed boost to just about everything.

Then, as advised, in the file: /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop

I went to line 2 and changed it from:

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Exec=plasma-desktop

to

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Exec=plasma-desktop -graphicssystem xv

(Other options besides xv are kwin and raster. xv seems to work best for me.)

With these simple changes, suddenly KDE 4 seems as responsive as XFCE. I suppose a howto should probably come out of all this, shouldn't it...

Niiler thanks for the tips..............that worked for me too.................

cheers,Vec

anyone finding anything else let us knowI found if your getting an annoying akonadi startup problem or a akonadi start progress bar then doing this sometimes helps:delete .local/akonadi from home folder then run in a terminal akonadictl stop then akonadictl status if stopped than do akonadictl start, Then run kontact from the office menu and click on all the options. Worked for me...............

I don't have anything like a full test yet, since I just installed on Monday with only CD1, then manually installed from CD2 yesterday, but found it was a corrupt download, so some packages were bad on it. I also updated and added a lot of stuff from the partial mirror of VL6 packages I have in my /home/repo and that was when I found a few of the problems I will mention for now.

We seem to have created even more of those package renaming issues that I had mentioned previously, way back at the beginning, when suggesting a separate repo for SOHO. Stuff like the qt to qt3 and qt4 to qt renaming fiasco (not to mention all those qt4-svn packages)... . Now we have packages from the repo asking for the missing sdl* deps when they are already installed on SOHO as SDL*. A similar issue occurs with gamin, now gamin-server.

There are also more issues with updated libraries breaking repo packages, which had already happened with newer libraries in the repo itself.

Also, vcpufreq is not the latest 2.4.2 version, which I hurried to get out so it would be in time for the final, the one included gave an error and did not run, though it could be due to the bad CD2, I haven't checked

All this is a shame, as SOHO seems to be looking good, though I will have to reinstall after downloading CD2 again, for a real test.

Logged

O'Neill (RE the Asgard): "Usually they ask nicely before they ignore us and do what they damn well please."http://joe1962.bigbox.infoRunning: VL 7 Std 64 + self-cooked XFCE-4.10

anyone finding anything else let us knowI found if your getting an annoying akonadi startup problem or a akonadi start progress bar then doing this sometimes helps:delete .local/akonadi from home folder then run in a terminal akonadictl stop then akonadictl status if stopped than do akonadictl start, Then run kontact from the office menu and click on all the options. Worked for me...............

Thanks, that fixed it for me. Strange problem - happened on some starts, not all.

I've hit another odd one - using Juk (?), it will play a single track, then pop up an error to say the Intel HDA device is no t working. It will then play two or three more tracks, then lose sound. Track appear to play, but no sound. If the app is restarted, it will go through the same cycle all over again. Very strange...

I haven't updated anything since the install, and vcpufreq does run, although it's not starting up at bootup. I, too, would like to see a separate SOHO 6 repo so updates don't break anything.

I think something like that may well be necessary - 6.0 SOHO is closer to the 7.0 alpha than it is to 6.0 Standard. Things built under 6.0 SOHO will probably break 6.0 Standard, and vice-versa.....

I'd like to be able to build a few things under SOHO, but I must admit to not having much luck so far. I wanted to rebuild the kdegraphics package, but can't find the source or build scripts for it at all. Is there a source repo area for SOHO?

Xorg configuration is screwed up irreparably, that this sometimes happens, then I am forwarded to Linux console.I tried to login as root ("root" without password) and restart "setup". This time I get the message that the system cannot find the VL CD-ROM in the drive.Maybe some cryptic boot parameter would remedy the disaster, but I have no idea what this parameter might be.Next I tried to boot into the old text-based installer (typing "linux" as boot parameter) This experiment ended quickly with the following message:No file system could mount root, tried: reiserfs ext3 ext2 ext4 ext4dev vfat msdos iso9660 ntfs jfs xfsKernel Panic - not syncing....

Same problem as Boris, perhaps is some problem with the dvdrom sony optiarc AD-7240S. I tried the install cd. in another p.c. and works.Regards

LCD brightness:After KDE fully loads, it suddenly jumps to 100%. The power profile is set correctly to a much lower intensity. This also happens after switching to battery power and back to mains. Back in Beta4 this was working properly on this same laptop. No idea yet was is going on.

vcpufreq:The installed 2.2.0 runs now, but too bad it didn't ship with the latest, which fixes a lot.

More later...

Logged

O'Neill (RE the Asgard): "Usually they ask nicely before they ignore us and do what they damn well please."http://joe1962.bigbox.infoRunning: VL 7 Std 64 + self-cooked XFCE-4.10

So I take it this only happens to me? I have researched the issue but have no idea why it is happening. It takes place pretty much after everything has loaded, even the many yellow sticky knotes on my desktop...

LCD brightness:After KDE fully loads, it suddenly jumps to 100%. The power profile is set correctly to a much lower intensity. This also happens after switching to battery power and back to mains. Back in Beta4 this was working properly on this same laptop. No idea yet was is going on.

Logged

O'Neill (RE the Asgard): "Usually they ask nicely before they ignore us and do what they damn well please."http://joe1962.bigbox.infoRunning: VL 7 Std 64 + self-cooked XFCE-4.10

The only way that i can get the installer to progress past the searching for media to install/analyse partitions step is to disconnect a specific SATA hard drive from the computer before booting it.If this particular drive is connected then the installer fails with a message about mdlmain.?.0 or somesuch. Running the installer from the terminal makes no difference. The installer fails at the same place.

The same disc seems to work fine in my laptop (it gets past the partition scan and locates the install media).

What is it that the installer does not like? Can someone offer any assistance with this issue?

I have isolated the problem i was describing. It appears that the order of the partitions on one of my hard disks was causing the installer script to raise an exception for whatever reason. The problem was with my (formerly) sdb1 partition.

According to fdisk /dev/sdb, the “Partition table entries are not in disk order”. I knew that this was the case - i had deleted some logical partitions, and had created this particular partition as a primary partition some time ago. It ended up being designated /dev/sdb1 - i don't know/remember why. For what it is worth, i have installed other VL versions with the partition table in this state without issue.

Having realised that the partition order might be the trouble, i issued the "f" command in the fdisk program to fix the partition table. After doing this, /dev/sdb1 became /dev/sdb4. It was necessary to alter the contents of the menu.lst file that grub uses so that i could continue to boot into the different operating systems that i have installed. As it happens, the renamed partition is where my main distribution, VL 5.9 SOHO, is installed. That is where i am typing from now.

So, after fixing the partition order i was able to use the CDs to install VL 6 SOHO final. I have gone through the install process several times now on different machines and have encountered some other issues which i will mention in another post.

I suspect that a contributing factor may be that my hard drive has way too many partitions; they've just sort of grown over time and i have never got around to cleaning it up.

The only way that i can get the installer to progress past the searching for media to install/analyse partitions step is to disconnect a specific SATA hard drive from the computer before booting it.If this particular drive is connected then the installer fails with a message about mdlmain.?.0 or somesuch. Running the installer from the terminal makes no difference. The installer fails at the same place.

The same disc seems to work fine in my laptop (it gets past the partition scan and locates the install media).

What is it that the installer does not like? Can someone offer any assistance with this issue?